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Quake Survivors Face a Landscape of Loss

Syunsuke Doi, left, at the gymnasium in Higashi-Matsushima where he had made a grim discovery. “I didn’t want to believe it, but I came here — and it’s my wife and my children,” he said.Credit
Shiho Fukada for the International Herald Tribune

HIGASHI-MATSUSHIMA, Japan — Outside the public gymnasium here, on a hillock about a mile from the Pacific Ocean, survivors of the tsunami came and went all day on Monday, searching for the dead.

Two hundred and sixteen sheets of printer paper were stuck on a wall, one for every body brought to the gymnasium so far, some with names, most bearing only physical descriptions. Hands anxiously clutched to mouths, people pored over them until, finding nothing, most turned away in relief. Syunsuke Doi, 22, did not.

At noon, Mr. Doi heaved great sobs on the gymnasium’s concrete steps, head in hands.

He was at work when the wave drove inland on Friday. His childhood sweetheart and wife, Sayaka, 22, was at home with their 2-year-old daughter and 6-month-old son.

Searchers found their bodies over the weekend, in the wave-battered family car in which they were trying to escape.

“I’d been looking everywhere, but I couldn’t find them,” Mr. Doi said. “I didn’t want to believe it, but I came here — and it’s my wife and my children.”

Yet the colossal physical havoc might be matched by the wrecked lives left in the tsunami’s wake. At the gymnasium here, as many citizens were reporting lost relatives as were searching the roll of those confirmed dead.

On the town’s outskirts, a squad of soldiers from Japan’s Self-Defense Force tramped through a hillside’s golden tallgrass, prodding the ground with long, thin metal poles. Below them was a vast lake, dotted with half-submerged vehicles and chunks of wood.

Before Friday, the lake had been a plain.

The soldiers were hunting for bodies. Asked whether they had found any, one replied, “Not yet.”

Some of those now counted as lost will certainly be reunited with loved ones, though it might take days. At too many turns, anguish was likely to worsen.

At the local hospital, Yoko Sato, 65, and her sister Hiromi, 69, were frantically hunting for another sister and a niece; their brother survived but was hospitalized.

“At home, all is gone,” they said. “We think they’re dead.”

At the gymnasium, one middle-age woman scoured the roster of the dead in vain, seeking her husband, who worked in the nearby seaside hamlet of Nobiru.

Photo

Evacuees gathered around the candlelight on Monday at a shelter in Yamamoto, Miyagi Prefecture, in northern Japan. Some 350,000 people have reportedly been left homeless across the country.Credit
Kyodo News, via Associated Press

“Thirty minutes after the earthquake,” she said, “I heard that the tsunami came to his work.”

“He went up to the roof. But the whole building was swept away, and he’s missing. Ninety percent, I’ve given up.”

She asked not to be named, as she had not yet told her children in Tokyo.

The tsunami’s fury landed full force in Nobiru, which was separated from the ocean by only a slender line of trees. The wall of water raced over the beach, picked up an entire subdivision of homes and hurdled a seawall en route to Higashi-Matsushima.

A cascade of debris dangled from the rail of a nearby bridge like drying laundry: rugs, tablecloths, a white lace slip, wires, cords, twisted pipes — even a kitchen sink.

On one winding Nobiru street perpendicular to the seashore, the wave sheared off house after house at the foundation, leaving only concrete bases and wood floors scoured eerily spotless by the rushing water.

As the sun began to set, Minae Chiba, 21, walked down that street with a co-worker, Mayumi Memoto, 31, toward what was once her parents’ home.

Ms. Chiba, a member of Japan’s Self-Defense Force, was in Sendai, about 40 miles south, when the tsunami hit. Her father, Shigemasa, 54, was at work. Her mother, Mariko, 51, was at home.

Ms. Chiba had heard from neither. As she walked to view the destruction for the first time, Ms. Memoto offered a hopeful note.

“There was 30 minutes’ warning,” she said. “They had time to leave.”

Ms. Chiba arrived at what used to be a gray two-story home with a decorative rice paddy as a front yard. Only the foundation was left. She snapped a picture with her cellphone, mounted two steps, stepped through a nonexistent front door and walked slowly across the floor.

Akiko Sato, 50, had fought to persuade her aging parents to evacuate, but they would not. As she packed a bag in her own Nobiru home, just steps away, she looked out the window.

“I couldn’t believe what I saw,” she recalled. “It looked like almost hundreds of thousands of horses running towards me, like a computer simulation game.”

“When it knocked down the house next to me, I said, ‘Oh, it’s my turn,’ ” Ms. Sato said.

But instead of leveling the house, the wave carried her into a corner, and her air-filled down jacket helped her float out a window.

There she clung to an awning until the wave receded.

It is a blue-moon instance of good news; Ms. Sato is looking forward to reuniting with her husband and son in Sendai.

But she is also waiting for news that is unlikely to be good.

“I wonder if my parents survived,” Ms. Sato said. “Everything is like a dream. But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Shiho Fukada contributed reporting from Nobiru, Japan.

A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2011, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: In the Aftermath of Disaster, Survivors Search a Landscape of Loss. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe